Throughout history, musical instruments have followed a process of co-evolution with developing technology to become what we know them as today. From the beginnings with sticks and bone, to cat-gut strings, to brass, to the piano-forte, and then to electronic synthesizers, musical instruments reflect the major technological breakthroughs of each time period.
As music technology continues to rapidly advance, the question of how acoustic instruments and traditional performance practice can be interfaced to current technological advancements must be continually re-evaluated and explored.
In the present age, the pervasiveness of computers, including mobile applications, is affecting music and other media technology. Having become invisibly interwoven into the fabric of our daily routine, developments in interactive computing have only begun to marginally affect conventional music instrument design and performance practice.
Attaching sensors to acoustic instruments to allow them to interact with sound using computers began with the hyperinstruments project at MIT. The hyperinstrument project was started in 1986 with the goal of designing expanded musical instruments, using technology to give extra power and finesse to virtuosic performers. The hyperinstruments were designed to augment guitars and keyboards, percussion and strings, and even conducting. A famous hyperinstrument application is the hypercello played by Yo-Yo Ma in the early 1990s. The hypercello allows the cellist to control an extensive array of sounds through performance nuance. The hypercello was an acoustic cello and a computer controlling synthesized sounds that accompanied the playing of the acoustic cello. Wrist measurements, bow pressure and position sensors, and left hand fingering position indicators enable the computer to measure, evaluate, and respond to a variety of aspects of the cellist's performance. The computer then controlled aspects of the sound of the cellist's performance. The sound of the performance was able to be affected by, in some cases, triggering and modifying the synthesized sounds that accompanied the acoustic cello.
Current trends in the Performance Arts, academic Computer Music conferences at national and international levels, and the gaming industry reveal a need for musicians to communicate gestural performance data of their musical instrument to a computer or other processing system. However, current literature in the field posits that the existing MIDI protocol, which utilizes the pitch-velocity-duration paradigm, has proven to be insufficient in representing the sensitive nuances that occur during live music performance.